Craig Johnson takes on the Mormon "lost boys"

A Serpent's Tooth, the ninth book in Craig Johnson's Walt Longmire mystery series

During this program, Wyoming author Craig Johnson talks about and reads from 'A Serpent's Tooth,' the ninth book in his Walt Longmire Mystery series, which has been adapted for TV: "Longmire" on the Arts & Entertainment channel.

BOOK SYNOPSIS

It’s homecoming for the Durant Dogies when Cord Lynear, a Mormon ‘lost boy’ forced off his compound for supposedly rebellious behavior, shows up in Absaroka County. Without much guidance, divine or otherwise, Sheriff Walt Longmire, his second-in-command Victoria Moretti, and his good friend Henry Standing Bear search for the boy’s mother and find themselves in a high plains scavenger hunt that ends at the barbed wire doorstep of an interstate polygamy group. Run by the four-hundred pound Roy Lynear—Cord’s father—the group is frighteningly well-armed and very good at keeping secrets.

Meanwhile, Walt’s got Cord locked up for his own good, but the Absaroka County jailhouse is getting crowded since the arrival of Cord’s self-appointed bodyguard, a delusional but dangerously spry old man who claims to be the now two-hundred-year old Orrin Porter Rockwell, Man of God, Son of Thunder, blessed by Joseph Smith himself. And to make life more complicated, things are heating up between Walt and his under-sheriff Vic, and she doesn’t take kindly to Walt’s new habit of sleeping in the jail to keep an eye on things.

As Walt, Henry and Vic pursue the Lynears, butting heads with the well-armed zealots, they hear whispers of Big Oil and the CIA and find they might be dealing with more than they bargained for.

Craig Johnson is the author of nine novels in the Walt Longmire mystery series, which has garnered popular and critical acclaim. The Cold Dish was a Dilys Award finalist and the French edition won Le Prix du Polar Nouvel Observateur/BibliObs. Death Without Company, the Wyoming State Historical Association’s Book of the Year, won France’s Le Prix 813. Another Man’s Moccasins was the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award winner and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers’ Book of the Year, and The Dark Horse, the fifth in the series, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. Junkyard Dogs won the Watson Award for a mystery novel with the best sidekick, and Hell Is Empty, selected by Library Journal as the Best Mystery of the Year, was a New York Times best seller, as was As the Crow Flies. The Walt Longmire series is the basis for the hit A&E drama, Longmire, starring Robert Taylor, Lou Diamond Phillips, and Katee Sackoff.

Johnson lives in Ucross, Wyoming, population twenty-five.

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During this program, Wyoming author Craig Johnson talks about and reads from 'A Serpent's Tooth,' the ninth book in his Walt Longmire Mystery series, which has been adapted for TV: 'Longmire' on A & E.